托福official67听力lecture2 Emotional Connection原文解析+翻译音频

[00:00.00]Professor: So we've established that there's a strong connection between emotions and memories. [00:09.95]Now, quite a bit of research has gone into investigating the connection. [00:14.48]One study conducted by a research team at Harvard, looked at how emotions affect, how much we remember, how many details of the memory were able to remember. [00:25.10]In the study, volunteers were shown a series of pictures. [00:29.74]Some were positive images like a child smiling, the summer negative, and some were just neutral. [00:36.89]Can anyone guess which images were the easiest to remember? Robert？
[00:41.57]Male Student: Uh, the most positive and negative images, the ones that triggered the strongest emotional responses.
[00:47.64]Professor: Right! Those images that generated a more extreme emotional response, positive or negative, they were easier to recall than the neutral images. [00:58.08]Pretty intuitive, right? But the scientists also found that people remember more details from a negative image than they do from a positive one.
[01:09.33]Male Student: How come?
[01:10.49]Professor: Well, we think it's rooted in how we respond to highly stressful or dangerous situations, by remembering a negative event in detail. [01:19.80]Well, those details might be really helpful if someday you're faced with a similar situation.
[01:25.36]Male Student: I think I know what you mean. [01:26.80]When I was younger, I was climbing a ladder and one of the rungs was wet and nearly slipped and fell. [01:32.67]I remember just how scared I felt. And I can still see the little beads of water on that step.
[01:38.40]Professor: And I bet you're careful around matters to this day, aren't you?
[01:42.07]Now, another question that researchers have focused on is, are there specific areas of the brain associated with different emotional states? [01:52.85]One neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tested this idea. [01:58.60]Damasio hypothesized that different emotions would trigger activity in different parts of the brain. [02:05.60]To test his hypothesis, a team of researchers hooked up some volunteers to brain scanning equipment and ask them to recall to relive actually some intense memories like the elation they felt on graduation day. [02:21.44]And the results supported Damasio hypothesis, remembering a happy event did indeed activate one area of the brain, while remembering a sad event activated another. [02:33.55]This finding that emotions of a specific type are associated with a specific brain region may help explain why when you're feeling a certain way the brain will activate memories of past situations associated with that particular feeling. [02:51.01]A phenomenon we call mood congruity. [02:54.46]Congruity means something like harmony between two things. [02:59.98]So, mood congruity works like this. [03:02.77]If you're feeling happy, it's more likely that your brain will call a pleasant memories. [03:07.95]Like that wonderful beach vacation you took last year, which, of course, just reinforces your happy mood. [03:14.38]The brain is wired to support your mood. It's not going to try to balance or temperate by producing memories that aren't consistent with the way you're feeling at that moment.
[03:24.67]But going back to Damasio teams’ experiment, there was one result that was unexpected. [03:33.27]And they discovered it when they looked at the scans of one particular region. The volunteers, prefrontal cortices. [03:41.33]Oh, okay. Who can tell me what they know about the prefrontal cortex?
[03:45.81]Male Student: Uh, that's the very front of the brain. It's responsible for... It's associated with generating ideas, right? With our capacity for creative thought?
[03:54.78]Professor: Yes, among other things. Well, what the researchers learned from the volunteers' brain scans was that when you're happy, your prefrontal cortex is extremely active. [04:06.05]But if you are depressed, your prefrontal cortex slows down. [04:10.49]It doesn't generate as many thoughts as it normally would. [04:14.14]So there's something about being sad, some change in the way the brain functions that diminishes the output from the prefrontal cortex.
[04:24.75]Now, that sounds like bad news, doesn't it? [04:28.53]Except well. This writer Steven Johnson, who writes popular books about the brain, has an interesting insight about this. [04:37.04]He said that he was actually relieved to read Damasio on expected finding. [04:43.58]You see, Johnson says that whenever he felt sad, he stopped having interesting thoughts and ideas. He ..he didn't feel creative at all. [04:52.54]His lack of productivity made him feel even worse, which, in turn, of course, prolonged his bad mood. [04:59.68]Damasio finding made Johnson realize that his prefrontal cortex was just responding temporarily to his negative state of mind. [05:08.86]So, now he just reminds himself that his creativity will return once his mood improves.